Homes Built With Brick Enjoy Better Market Appeal

Once a very common sight around Greater Atlanta, brick is rapidly disappearing from the scene. Homes built with brick enjoy better market appeal, it's a recognized advantage over just about any other exterior surface. The brick is not structural, rather it's an exterior cladding independently supported and tied to the framing with "brick ties".  Brick is virtually maintenance free - when properly installed. The most common issues tend to involve cracking and drainage, cracks above wide openings in particular.

Brick Cracks Above the Garage

This is a pretty common occurrence and is often due to either the lintel supporting the brick sagging or one of the support columns settling over time. Here we saw the support post settle a bit, this causes the end of the lintel to drop as well. The resulting drop caused the brick to move and we see cracks develop. The answer is to stabilize the column and remortar the impacted areas. Fairly common on older homes and something that can be effectively corrected.   

Installing Brick on a Home

That video highlighted a brick installation on the front of a new build. The illustration above is a good sectional view, the video gives a real world example of how this looks on a home.  

Well Installed Brick

The brick work on this home was well done. Neat, straight and no signs of any movement. Much has to do with the prep work, note the excellent condition of the driveway. Great use of control joints in anticipation of the cracks due to the concrete shrinking. Proper footings and compaction are also very important and often glossed over, looks like they did it right on this one.

Homes built with brick just feel better. The advantages are many and while there might be issues from time to time, in most cases they can be addressed for nominal cost. Unfortunately, brick is disappearing from the construction scene as builders continue to squeeze everything to maintain profit margins. Certainly more labor intensive and costly, but the timeless appeal of brick often justifies that. 

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